I ran across an interesting article about the future of retail marketing and on line marketing. The article speculates on a future of Retail in the Web 2.0 Environment.

“It’s a scary scenario. A few major players could take over Web 2.0,” said LeHong, suggesting that a merged entity such as a combined Google and Amazon.com could dominate as a “pretailer,” a product search and price comparison portal.” He calls this GOOGAZON.

The fear here is that such an entity would begin to dominate transactions to a level that they dictate terms to the retailers and business owners. Similar to how a Walmart store effects traditional retail stores in some markets it moves into. This type of entity could flex some big wallet marketing muscle to make sure they are the ones dicatating the terms of the new Web 2.0 Retail Market.

Personally while I agree that in theory this is all possible I have faith that many online business owners and marketers out there will not want to lose their ability to market and sell on line in whatever way they choose. I think that this type of relationship would attract an audience but there is still at least as many if not more consumers for whom the Web 2.0 Retail landscape means more choices, more information and they will want to have choices other than a Googazon type company. The most obvious choice for those consumers is going to be a retail blog and retail blog marketing program.

The retail blog will offer all the features of user input instantly updated information and user reviews that will increase loyalty and attract some of the best most qualified buyers on line. I talked to a company today with a retail blog that recieved 30,000 visitors in the last 3 days. Talk about increase in sales.

In this part 3 of Business Blog Descriptions we will be looking at a Real Estate Blog

A real estate blog most often is done by a real estate agent. The real estate blog will do the following:

• Showcase the agent’s expertise and knowledge of the area they service
• Provide a place to show listings
• Overcome the credibility issue -potential buyers will feel they already know you after reading your blog
• Provide an entry point in into the blogosphere’s over 50 Million readers
• Increase listings-a real estate agent that lists properties for sale in their blog is showing to potetenial sellers that they are going to aggresively market their home
• Use RSS Feeds to attract buyers and sellers

Overall a real estate blog is a simple effective way to bring in new buyers, and sellers to help the agent increase sales and listings.

ABC is launching a viral marketing campaign “live” actors will be slipping notes to people telling them to contact them online.
Details of this viral marketing campaign here.

Types of Business Blogs
In the earlier post we covered a basic overview of what a business blog is. Today I wanted to talk about a specific type of business blog or corporate blogs.

Retail Blog

A retail corporate blog can take many forms. An online retail company can use a retail blog as a blog marketing campaign to help increase site visits for potential customers searching for their products.

Writing in their blog about new products , or writing reviews about products that they carry is an easy way to build up content and brand a retail site as an authority in their retail space. I have seen some clients with retail sites get better results from a business blog than with years of optimization or ppc campaigns. A professional corporate blog in the retail space if properly optimized can improve search rankings and branding in the blogosphere.

Tommorow: Real Estate Blog

Saw a post about Searchmash, Both Posts I saw say this is Google’s.

It is definately simple like when Google First Started…I like the fact that there is no search button.(you have to hit enter) and there many other features I haven’t played around with yet but here is a link to the features.

Here is the cool look, I don’t know if it will stay this way but this is just right. The less on the search page the better.

Right now all I saw was a way to search images and webpages while it displays some images on the right. I am sure it will soon give readers the option to search blogs also, if not it will already be not as full featured as MSN Live Search. Google has a blog search engine now and it only makes sense that any new search option they develop will incorporate these blog search results.

Found this Here

We have to talked to many companies over the last 6 months and some know about blogs. Many more however have heard of blogs but that seems to be the extent of their knowledge. This brief article is for those who might be new to blogging, or haven’t started but are thinking about it.

This is not a history of blogs but just a short look at how a business blog can help any company.
A business blog often called a corporate blog is a website that is on a blog platform. The blog platform or layout has frequently updated articles called posts, that are displayed usually with the latest article or post at the top of the site. On the blog there are usually links to a company website and maybe other websites relevant to what the targeted audience might want to learn or read about. The articles in the blog cover a wide range of topics and include everything from personal experiences of the writer to product news updates and sales. It’s really up to the company. You have to consider the message you want to send, and then look at all the variables that exist in HOW you send the message, or how you blog for your business.

Tommorow I will get a little more specific as to what types of options you have in the message of your business blog and also some considerations as to how to deliver that message.